SLIDING INTO THE WEEKEND

The Games from rinks to slopes

Wolfgang Staudinger is not unfamiliar with the idea of success breeding success. The cheerful and loose-talking German left his home country’s luge team 11 years ago to take over the Canadian program.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but Germany is to luge as Canada is to hockey. They don’t win all the medals, but most of them, and they could probably field three different luge teams here and have them all be competitive.

And so it was, amid the mirth at the Olympic Sliding Centre, with the Canadian lugers celebrating a huge silver medal in the team relay, that Staudinger discussed the effect of Alex Gough winning a bronze in women’s singles two nights earlier.

“The thing is, once you have one that wins a medal, the motivation, the focus and everything goes up because the rest (of the team), they want to win one, too,” Staudinger said. He said it happened with his former German charges all the time. “They don’t want to go home empty-handed. I’m sure that was motivation booster and a confidence booster. Just being around the guys, I could see that they were ready. They were not scared, they were, like, going into a battle in a war. They knew what they wanted to do and they did it.”

If you’re looking to start an argument between a group of athletes, coaches and sportswriters, throw out the topic of momentum and ask them if it matters. Some will absolutely believe that it does, that in something like an Olympics, early success for a country will lead to more of it. Others will disagree, and point out that sports are full of discrete events that happen in fractions of a second. Did the luge breakthrough on Tuesday clear the way for the silver on Thursday? Or did the Canadians just slide really well because they had been training for that moment for years?

The answer is academic. And, while that is uncertain, what is undeniable is this: Canada, about halfway through Pyeongchang 2018, is on some kind of roll. Team Canada came into these games full of bold talk and lofty predictions. They expected these to be the best-Olympics for Canada, not a modest goal given the record-setting performances in Vancouver and Sochi. But despite that high bar, Canadian athletes have lived up to the increased expectations. Medals came early, and they have come often. With 13 podium finishes through seven official days of competition, Canada is in good shape to blow past the 26 medals won at Vancouver 2010. So much for that old joke about fourth place being the Canadian bronze.

There have been some surprises — Ted-Jan Bloemen’s dismantling of Sven Kramer in the 10,000 metres at the speedskating oval, and those luge medals that were the first in Canadian Olympic history — and there have been Canadians that came in with all the pressure of gold-medal hopes, and still managed to deliver. Look at the elation in Mikael Kingsbury’s face when he realizes he’ll be an Olympic champion, and you’ll see the sweet release of four years of building expectations.

In an event this big, there have also been moments of sadness. Cross-country skier Alex Harvey hasn’t had the Games he had planned, Rachel Homan’s curling rink started a baffling 0-3, and moguls skier Andi Naude had the final spot of the Olympics, with a medal there for the taking, and lost her line. Hers is the strongest case against the alleged benefit of momentum. Teammate Justine Dufour-Lapointe had already secured a podium spot, and Naude rode that success right off the course. If success is so infectious, it was hard to see through Naude’s tears.

But on balance, there’s no disputing the Canadian results so far. There are many more medal contenders competing over the next week-and-a-half and, barring a shocking turn, the Canadians will win more medals at this Olympics than ever before. That will be a validation of the way high-performance sport in Canada has been run for the past decade.

The disciplines that have been particularly well funded through programs like Own the Podium — freestyle skiing, snowboard, long- and short-track speedskating, figure skating — have already delivered medals, and there remains potential for more. The long shots, the sports that weren’t deemed worthy of extra financial support, haven’t come out of nowhere to win surprise medals.

There are, to be sure, arguments against the rich-get-richer approach. But right now, the results say it all. A Canadian bronze has become just that: a bronze.